Editor’s Note: Lubbock Lights Editor Terry Greenberg wrote this story and others for the Texas Tech Centennial website more than two years ago. Tech has given us permission to reprint selected stories from the site. To see all 100-plus “Impact Stories” go to 100.ttu.edu, and scroll down the home page to 100 Impact Stories, following choices from there. This story was chosen as Texas Tech gets ready to play Arizona State Saturday and travel to Arizona October 5, bringing back memories of Tech’s time in the Border Conference decades ago.
There’s a stone bench near the first tee box at Tech Tech’s Rawls Golf Course with the following inscription:
J.M. (Panny) Farmer
Border Conference Golf Champion
1936
1st Texas Tech Individual Champion
Texas Technological College competed in the Border Conference from 1932 until it joined the Southwest Conference in the late 1950s.
It was a football power in the conference with nine colleges in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.
But as well as Tech did in the Border Conference, it was the school’s second choice.
Tech applied to the Southwestern Conference on Sept. 17, 1927 and was rejected. It joined the Border Conference the year after the conference was formed in 1931 – joining:
- University of Arizona
- Arizona State Teachers College at Flagstaff (now Northern Arizona University)
- Arizona State Teachers College at Tempe (now Arizona State University)
- University of New Mexico
- New Mexico College of Agriculture and Mechanical Arts (now New Mexico State University)
From 1935 to 1941, the conference added:
- The College of Mines and Metallurgy of the University of Texas (now University of Texas at El Paso).
- Hardin-Simmons University
- West Texas State Teachers College (now West Texas A&M University)
Tech won a record nine Border Conference football titles from 1937 to 1955. The conference champion was usually the host team in the Sun Bowl in El Paso.
The Red Raiders played in five Sun Bowls from 1938-1956, but only won in 1952, beating Pacific, 25-14. It was the first bowl game Tech won and Quarterback Junior Arteburn was the game’s Most Valuable Player.
Arteburn became a Tech assistant coach and worked in the university’s admissions offices until he retired in 1998. Arteburn and his wife Joyce are the only husband and wife in the Texas Tech Athletic Hall of Fame/Hall of Honor. Joyce worked in Tech’s Physical Education Department for 37 years and was the first faculty sponsor for the High Riders student organization.
A few years before Texas Tech left for the Southwestern Conference, New Mexico and Northern Arizona had also left.
Texas Tech applied to the Southwest Conference numerous times before they heard yes. When Tech left the Border Conference, the following was in Sports Illustrated in 1956:
“Perennial champion Texas Tech has withdrawn from the Border Conference to join the Southwest, but the conference commissioner has ruled that all games played against Texas Tech by other members of the Border will still count in the standings. Tech is not eligible, however, to win the title, so the boys from Lubbock find themselves in the peculiar position of being unfrocked participants in the conference struggle. Last year Arizona State (Tempe), sporting the multiple offense, gave new Coach Dan Devine an 8-2 record and finished second only to Texas Tech. Their chances for winning the championship in 1956 are excellent, especially since they don’t play Tech.”
In the years Tech was in the Southwestern Conference, the Red Raiders played in four more Sun Bowls and lost all of them:
- 1964: Georgia 7, Tech 0
- 1970: No. 13 Georgia Tech 17, No. 19 Texas Tech 9
- 1972: No. 16 North Carolina 32, Tech 28
- 1993: No. 19 Oklahoma 41, Tech 10
So the Red Raiders are 1-8 in Sun Bowl games – 15 wins and 23 losses in all bowl games.
By the early 1960s, the Border Conference was gone.
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